Fast Days

After another ten days in Israel, I have come to understand better why the Jewish people established fast days for their calendar. It's to give everyone some relief from the incessant eating. We've been here first traveling around with Andy & Peggy, and then more recently staying with Hilla and Boaz, our friends from Modi'in, and it seems as though we haven't had five minutes when we weren't eating.

Something new for me this trip was the Arab coffee. Coffee in Israel used to be lousy; anywhere but the best hotels, they served instant coffee, and told you that was the way Israelis drank coffee. Sometime over the past couple years, coffee culture has come to the holy land. Now everyone makes decent coffee; several coffee shop chains have sprouted up (not Starbucks; instead, they have their own homegrown chains); and the old Nescafe is rarely found anywhere. For some reason on past trips, even though the local coffee was not particularly good, I hadn't indulged in Arab coffee, but this time we tasted it all over. In the old city of Jerusalem, at some little Druse village where we stopped for pastries; even at Moshav Tzipori. Arab coffee is what I would have previously called Turkish coffee - real strong, and brewed by boiling the grounds repeatedly - seven times is the old-fashioned recipe- but it's also flavored with Cardomom. Little cups, the size of an expresso. Excellent.

Early in the trip, when we were driving through the Galilee, I raved to Peggy about the local pastries, and then for around three days, we seemed to eat baklava morning, noon and night. The Arab and Druse villages always feature little pastry shops, not the local bakeries, but shops where the sweets are made and sold. And while we are familiar with one kind of baklava, these shops must sell a dozen different kinds - some walnut, some pistachio - different flavored honeys- some with filo dough, and some with this shredded wheat dough - some square, some triangle, some round. I couldn't always discern the differences among them, although Peggy could immediately figure out what was what.

Then, of course, we ate humus at every possible opportunity. We ate it for breakfast in the hotels; we ate it at every lunch; we didn't always eat it for dinner, only about 75% of the dinners. They have all these styles of humus here - some with a big pile of chick peas in the center - some with tahini - some with oil and spices. I think Andy personally, all by himself, ate fifteen or twenty pounds of humus in the five days we spent together.

Shakshuka. We had tasted Shakshuka previously, because Gidon makes it, and because Mike loves it. It's a sephardi breakfast dish - eggs poached in a spicy tomato stew. But for some reason, it never seemed to captivate us on previous trips. This time, we went crazy for the stuff, perhaps because our hotel featured it on the breakfast buffet, and everyone seemed to like it. So we tried it all over the north, either for breakfast or lunch. No two people seem to make their Shakshuka the same. Sometimes it's spicy hot; once we got it with ground meat in with the tomatoes; once it had some unique spice that no one could identify; our hotel made it spicy and sweet.

And I can't discuss food in Israel without giving credit to Gidon for his medley of Yemenite breads. I wont even try to remember their names, but I can at least describe a couple of my favorites. There is Galube, which is Yemenite fried dough, more or less. No powdered sugar, and best eaten when it's hot, right out of the oil. It was part of our huge Yemenite Shabbat dinner. Then there is the spongy flat bread, which is very light, with a soft mild taste, and is really quite unlike any other bread with which I'm at all familiar. Hilla knew of it; and we actually found it at a cafe near the Tel Aviv harbor one afternoon.

We didn't eat as much Halvah as, for example, baklava, but if I'm going to discuss food is Israel, I have to mention the Halvah. I'm not talking about the pre-packaged stuff one finds at Fox's; nor even the big slabs from which a pound piece can be carved. I'm talking about two dozen different flavors and textures. Marble, pistachio, chocolate, walnut. We stopped in a spice shop in Ra-ananah the very first day, and after tasting at least six different flavors, bought a couple pieces to share. They barely lasted a few minutes. The next day, in the Jerusalem shuk, we found an even more impressive display, but by then we were already overwhelmed by the pastries, by the baked goods, by the dried fruits. But if you wanted to focus solely on Halvah, you could spend all week tasting it, and still not sample everything.

Red wine. Israeli wine is getting better all the time; and I was insistent throughout this visit that we only drink Israeli wine. We ate Italian food in Herzliya one night, and they featured some fine Italian wines on the menu, but we drank Gamli Pinot Noir. For shabbat, we stopped in a liquor store near the shuk, and Fran suggested buying some Zinfandel from California. No way. We settled on a Cab-Shiraz blend, but I cannot recall the winery. Last night, we had a fabulous bottle of Tulip Syrah, perhaps the best bottle of Israeli wine we'd ever tasted. Their reds, even the Syrah, are light, much lighter than the Malbec, and Shiraz we normally drink. But even so, they are often great, and clearly seem to be improving on each visit.

We'll be heading home soon, and we saw some wonderful places on this trip. But if one thing made this visit stand out from the others, it was the food and drink.